SEMrush offers the following amazing tools that help businesses to grow their online business:

Site Audit

Backlink Audit

Keyword Magic Tool for keyword research

Domain analysis

Keyword Difficulty Tool

On-Page SEO Checker

Domain vs. Domain

Brand Monitoring

Link Building

Lead Generation Tool

Content Analyzer

Social Media Poster

Position Tracking

PCC Keyword Tool

Social Media Tracker

Position Tracking

the list goes on…

SEMrush Pricing: Is SEMrush Costly?

Do you also think that SEMrush is EXPENSIVE?

Well, it is not! Let me explain this to you…

What do you think, what should be the price of a keyword research tool? and what for a backlink monitoring tool?

You may say, 50$ per month!

Let’s take 10$ per month as the cost of each tool SEMrush offers.

SEMrush offers 40+ advanced SEO and Social media tools, I already shared the list of some of them above.

If each tool cost 10$ per month then the cost of the overall SEMrush which offers all these tools at one place should be 400$ per month. Let’s make it half, still, the price of a tool which offers all the tools should be $200.

But it is starting from 99.95$ per month, do you still think it is EXPENSIVE?

Let’s calculate the cost of these four tools only, forget about the other tools SEMrush offer for a second. The total is $118 per month for these four tools only, but SEMrush has 40+ advanced SEO tools and charges only 99.95$/month.

So, if you look deeper then the SEMrush is not an expensive tool.

But I can understand, as a beginner, it may not affordable…

Basically, SEMrush has three plans Pro, Guru and Business and it costs $99.95, $199.95 and $399.95 per month respectively.

It depends on your needs which plan you should go with — if you are a beginner and just took your first step in the SEO or content marketing field then the Pro plan is enough for you.

SEMrush Pro Plan

This is the starter plan of SEMrush which costs $99.95 per month… If you are a blogger, freelancer or a new startup then this plan is good for you.

Just after hitting the Create your SEMrush account button, you will be redirected to choose the plan for 7-days trial.

For getting the SEMrush Free account, you need to click on Skip trial link at the end as you can see in the image below.

Congrats, you successfully created your SEMrush free account.

My Secret Weapon To Dominate SEO

SEMrush is the tool that I’m using since 4 years back to ensure my blog’s growth on SERP. It really makes easy to perform keyword research, technical site audit, backlink audit, stealing backlinks from competitors, spying competitors and much more.

* This is an affiliate link, I might get a commission but it will not add any extra cost to you.

Understand The SEMrush Dashboard

Almost all the tools that SEMrush offers can be access to the dashboard directly. It makes easy to monitor your website performance, SEO performance, position tracking etc…

Domain box at the top, enter your domain or your competitor’s domains to track their performance. You will be able to check the Ogragic keywords and traffic directly from the dashboard.

Position Tracking: Take your eyes on your domain rankings for the keywords and for any location. It will show your daily updates about your or your competitor’s rankings.

Site Audit: SEMrush site audit tool allow you to conduct your site’s health check and notify you about the issues which might affect your ranking on SERPs.

On-Page SEO Checker: It will help to show all the on-page optimization ideas directly on the Dashboard that you can use to optimize your content and to outrank your competitors.

Social Media Tracker: Connect to your social media accounts to track your social growth and compare to your competitors. It will help you to analyze how your audience interacts with your social content.

Brand Monitoring: SEMrush brand monitoring tool will notify you about your brand mention on the web, be it on social media or internet news sites.

Notes: SEMrush makes sure that its customer should be updated with the latest thing happening in the SEO industry.

SEMrush Sensor: SEMrush Sensor monitors the SERP volatility, which helps to identify the ongoing search engine algorithm changes. It will also help you to view your volatility score to determine if your website affected by the updates or not.

Organic Traffic Insights: Connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console account to see all the traffic metrics like bounce rate, average session duration and so on. It can also identify the “not provided” keywords in your account.

Display Advertising: Display Advertising tool helps you to preview ad text and banner for the specific keywords, you can also spy on your competitors’ display advertisement strategies.

Find Profitable Keywords Using SEMrush

Keyword research is the first thing that you need to do when starting a blog or writing a blog post.

Without proper keyword research, you can’t even imagine outranking your competitors who are already ranking in your NICHE.

And for this, you need a good keyword research tool which can make keyword research super easy for you.

It makes easy to find easy to rank keywords using its advance filter options. Not only this, but it also helps in finding long-tail keywords also.

You can access the SEMrush keywords database which has 18.6B keywords through its dashboard, just by entering your seed keywords and hit search.

Just after hitting the search button, you will see visualized report for the keyword you searched.

On the left side, you will see the Organic Search data like the volume and number of result that keyword has.

Apart from the Organic, it also shows you the paid search insights like the CPC of the keyword and the competition over the advertisers.

On the right side of the screen, you can see the “Trend” graph which will help you to work on the keywords seasonality. You can easily know through this graph that, is the keyword good to work on or not?

On the Keyword Suggestion box(right side from the Trend graph), It tells you the no. of keyword ideas SEMrush can prepare for you along with the Average volume and difficulty.

Just down a bit, you will see Phrase Match Keywords and Related Keywords which will help you to get more ideas related to the seed keyword you are going to write on.

Phrase Match Keywords: These are the keywords that contain you seed keywords in the body or you can say it matched to your seed keywords.

Related Keywords: These are the related keywords to your seed keywords, it will help you to explore more related terms peoples are searching for the topic you are going to write.

You can check the SERP result for each keyword, just by clicking the Page icon next to it.

There is another section on the SEMrush keyword overview report which can help you a lot to compete with the others who are already ranking.

SEMrush shows you the 100 results for your seed keyword, you can use this section to know with whom you are going to compete for the top ranking.

This will help you to explore their content and write a more useful piece than theirs.

Try to find out:

Topics they have talked about?

What they missed?

How many backlinks they have?

How did they optimize their content for SEO?

Understand The Keyword Magic Tool

You can access the Keyword Magic Tool from the left side menu by going to Keyword Analytics>Keyword Magic Tool.

This is how the SEMrush keyword magic tool looks like:

Enter your seed keyword in the box and hit the Search button to get all the keyword ideas related to your seed keyword/topic.

Using The Advanced Filter And Sorting Options

Click on the Advanced Filter option at the top to see all filter options…

You can have the keyword ideas that include any specific word using the Include Keywords option. And the same you can do with the Exclude keywords option, you can exclude all the keyword ideas that contain a specific word in its body.

For example, I want to see only the keywords that contain “coupon” word in the body. So, I have added the coupon in the include keywords option.

In the Advanced filters option, you can filter out the results to find exactly what you want. Like for example, let’s say you want only long-tail keywords with at least 4 words.

So, just use Word Count filter and add 4 in the from field and you are good to go.

Just after clicking Apply Filters, SEMrush will update the list of keywords and will show you only keywords with 4 or more words.

As you can see on the image above, all the keyword contains 4 or more words.

You can do the same with the Keyword difficulty to find low competition keywords, just need to enter the KD. from low to high and you will get the results.

You can also sort your results in ascending or descending order using the header options.

Just click on the header to sort the result. Let’s say, you want to see the keyword with high volume on the top so click on the Volume column’s header to sort the results.

Keywords with the high volume are on the top and it is decreasing from top to bottom, you can revert this order just by clicking on the volume(header) again.

You can do the same with the KD, CPC, Comp and other, just click on the header to sort the result.

This filters and sorting feature really help in finding the profitable keywords which are easy to rank.

Find Question Keywords Using SEMrush

Do you what are the question keywords?

Question keywords are the questions that people search on Google or other search engines about a topic and seed keyword.

These keywords also considered as long-tail keywords and easy to rank because of having low-competition.

These are the keywords that bloggers use to add in the FAQ Section of their blog posts.

Watch this video to learn how you can add FAQ Schema in WordPress… You will also learn how to find questions keywords for FAQ Schema.

SEMrush keyword magic tool makes easy to find question keywords.

Open the Keyword Magic tool and search for the topic you want to find question keywords for. On the results page, click on the Questions.

Now SEMrush will refresh the list and you will be seeing the question keywords only.

This is the process you can use to find the question keywords related to your topic.

Performing Site Audit Using SEMrush

SEMrush offers site audit tool which can help you to find all the issues related to your website which might cause problems in future.

These issues might be a problem which is not letting you rank in SERPs. You can find all those issues and resolve them for higher rankings in SERPs.

SEMrush will check your entire website and give you Site Health score as you can see in the above image.

You will be informed about all the errors, warnings and notices on the same result page.

Click on the Errors or Warnings to see all the issues which are hurting your website’s SEO. These can be issues that are stopping you to get higher rankings and traffic.

If you want to do these task later then you can use Send to Trello button to save the card on your Trello account.

I clicked on the “45 images don’t have alt attributes” issue to see all the images and their link so I can add the ALT attributes in all those 45 images.

You can do the same with any issue that you got after performing a site audit using SEMrush to find the pages, posts and images that are causing the issue.

Once you come to know about all the pages which are creating issue, you can easily fix them.

Backlink Audit Using SEMrush

SEMrush backlink audit tool helps me a lot, you might not know that I have purchased backlinks from Fiverr just by paying 5$.

Later I realized that the backlinks I got were from the spammy low-quality sites which started affecting my blog’s SEO.

But my good luck that I was using SEMrush, SEMrush backlink audit tool comes in play and helped me to find all those backlinks from the toxic backlinks.

Go to Projects from the left-side menu… And add a project by entering your domain…

On the Backlink Audit, click on the Set up button to perform a backlink audit of your domain.

Choose the Root domain in the Campaign Scope. Hit the Start Backlink Audit button at the bottom.

Connect your Google Search Console to see the toxicity of every backlink you have.

On the next screen, SEMrush will show the total referring domains you have and total analyzed backlinks.

As you can see in the image below, this domain have High overall toxic score. It means that many toxic domains are pointed to this domain.

Click on the Audit tab to see all the toxic backlinks pointing to your domain.

See all the domain that has a high toxic score, you need to disavow all those domains which have a high toxic score. SEMrush itself highlight them with red colour and orange colour for potentially toxic. A domain with the low toxic score highlighted with the green colour.

Dealing With The Toxic Backlinks

As I said, SEMrush Backlink tool helps me a lot in getting rid of toxic backlinks.

SEMrush has two options that you can use to get rid of all the toxic backlinks you have:

Remove: Using the Remove option, SEMrush will send an email to all the toxic domains you selected to remove the link pointing your domain.

Disavow: By Disavowing a backlink, you are saying Google to ignore this backlink when crawling your website.

Using Google Disavow Tool

You can use the Google disavow tool to get rid of all the toxic and spammy backlinks your domain has.

SEMrush itself allows you to add all those toxic domains to SEMrush disavow tab from where you can get the Google disavow file created by SEMrush.

Find the disavow option under the Delete button…

Select all the backlinks which have a high toxic score and Disavow them using the To Disavow button as you can see in the above image.

All those domains which you selected to disavow will be found in the Disavow tab.

Click on the Export to TXT button to export all the toxic backlink in Google Disavow file.

Now open the Google Disavow Tool and upload the Google disavow file you exported from the SEMrush.

This is how you can disavow toxic backlinks using the SEMrush and Google Disavow tool.

Remove Toxic Backlinks

You can remove the toxic backlinks permanently from the website where they placed using the SEMrush.

Select the backlink you want to remove, and click on Delete>To Remove. It will be sent to the Remove tab…

SEMrush will provide you with a pre-made email template to send, feel free to modify the email template to fit your need.

You can also use the follow–up email which should be send if your request will not get any response from the domain owner.

When you feel everything is ready, click on the Send button to send your request.

SEMrush On-Page SEO Checker

SEMrush offers on-page SEO checker which you can use to improve your on-page SEO for the selected pages.

This will help you to gain more organic traffic and also high ranking for your pages.

You can set up the On-Page SEO Checker from the same project page.

SEMrush will show all the On-Page SEO improvement ideas that will help you to gain higher ranking and that will result in high traffic.

SEMrush also shows you the potential organic traffic you can gain after following all the optimization ideas that SEMrush showed you.

On the On-Page SEO Checker report page, you will get the ideas that you can follow to optimize your on-page SEO for selected pages. These ideas are divided into categories:

Strategy Ideas: Strategy Ideas are related to optimizations in your keywords strategy. It happens many time when you have two pages that target the same keyword. In this situation, Google also gets confused which one it should give higher ranking if anyone is eligible. Strategy ideas help you to avoid “keyword cannibalization“.

Backlinks Ideas: Backlink is one of the most important role players in the ranking. SEMrush will show you the list of domains that have given backlinks to your competitors. You can reach them for linking to you it will help you to get higher rankings in SERPs.

Technical SEO Ideas: Techincal SEO issues may negatively affect your website’s SEO and you may lose all the hard work you did on your website. But SEMrush On-Page SEO checker will notify you about the technical issues on your website and show how to fix them.

User Experience Ideas: Google deeply cares about the User experience, SEMrush will show you the User Experience improvement ideas you can follow to provide a good user experience to your visitor.

Semantic Ideas: Apart from the keywords, Google also look for the related words in your content to find its relevancy. SEMrush will show you all the ideas what you need to follow to improve the relevancy of your content using Semantic keywords.

Content Ideas: SEMrush will show you the ideas about how you can place your target keywords to get the most out of SERPs. It will provide you with content optimization ideas like Keyword placement, readability improvement etc.

SEMrush For Spying Your Competitors

SEMrush can be the lead role-playing tool for you to outrank your competitors.

SEMrush let you spy on your competitors so you can easily know what keywords they are ranking for, who is linking to them and so on.

A very power tool SEMrush is when it comes to spying competitors in order to outrank them on SERPs.

This is where SEMrush’s Domain overview tool comes in play.

Head over to Domain Analytic>Overview to access the Domain analytic tool, you can also use the search box at the dashboard though.

Enter the competitor’s domain you want to spy on, and hit the search button. I am pretending bloggingcage.com as my competitor just for this tutorial.

On the next page, you will be seeing the total no. of keywords your competitor is ranking for, how many backlinks they have etc.

You can also see the traffic ups and downs in the Traffic Trend chart shown on the screen.

Find Your Competitor’s Ranking Keywords

You can see the keywords your competitor is ranking for using the SEMrush.

Scroll down a bit to the Top Organic Keywords section. This shows you all the keywords your competitor is ranking for along with their position in the SERPs and the metrics of the keywords like volume, CPC etc.

Click on the View Full Report to see all the keywords your competitor is ranking for along with the position of your competitor in SERP and the URL of the page.

So, you can get an idea about the content they have written to gain this position in SERP.

You can also export the list using the Export button on the right side.

Find The Keyword Gap

You can use the SEMrush Keyword gap tool to find the keywords gap between you and your competitor, means the keywords your competitor is ranking for but you are not.

This will help you to gain the ranking for the same keywords by writing quality content around that.

Head over to Gap Analysis>Keyword Gap and enter your competitor’s domain and your domain. You can add up to 5 domains…

Enter your competitor’s domain in the first box and your domain in the second.

You can see an overlapping circle icon between the two boxes where you added the domains. Click on that and select “Unique to the first domain’s keywords” and hit the Go.

These are the keywords which BloggingCage is ranking for but I am not. So, by this process, I got the keywords ideas which I can write content on to earn some rankings on SERPs.

Find Competitor’s Top Backlinks Sources

If you can identify who is linking to your competitor then it can help you to steal some backlinks from your competitors.

SEMrush can also help you to find who is linking to your competitors.

On the Domain Overview report page, scroll down to Backlinks sections.

This section will show you the top backlinks sources of your competitor and also the backlink profile, follow vs Nofollow.

Click on the View full report to see all the backlinks sources of your competitor.

In the backlinks report, you can see the domain which is pointing to your competitors and also the Anchor text and target URL.

This data will help you to reach out to the domains who linked to your competitors to link to you as well if you have similar content.

Find The Backlink Gap

As keyword gap, you can also find the backlinks gap between you and your competitors.

Being in the same niche, you can find who is linking to your competitor but not you, so you can ask them to link to you if you have similar content.

Head over to Gap Analysis>Backlink Gap and enter your competitor’s domain in the first box and yours in the second.

The result shows you the referring domains and the backlinks you and your competitor have. This will help you to find who linked to your competitor but not you.

And reaching to those domains may bring some backlinks to you because the niche of you and your competitor is the same.

No one will mind linking to you if you provide the same content to which they linked to your competitor’s site.

SEMrush Backlink Gap is a powerful tool which can help you to bring some backlinks to your domain.

Generating New Content Ideas Using SEMrush Topic Research

How you find new content ideas to write on your blog?

Isn’t it difficult sometimes?

And when you failed to find new content ideas, you fall in Writer’s block.

SEMrush topic research tool will not let this happen this with you, because it will help you to find the killer content ideas that you can write on. It will also craft a list for you of the trending topics in your niche.

So, for getting started with the SEMrush topic research tool, Navigate to Topic Research from the left side menu.

Enter your Topic/Seed Keyword in the box to get the related content ideas. If you want to get content ideas from your competitors then you can also add your competitor’s domain just by clicking “+Enter domain to find content on“

This is not a mandatory option, you can leave it untouched also.

Just after hitting the Get Content Ideas button, SEMrush will show you all the potential content ideas that include, Headlines, Questions and Related Searches in four different styles:

Card View

Explorer View

Overview

Mind Map

Let’s take a quick look at all four style one-by-one:

Card View

All the content ideas are shown in the form of Cards, as you can see in the below image.

If you click on any card, you will see more info like headlines, questions and related searches. You’ll also be able to see the Subtopic volume, difficult and topic efficiency.

Use the Trending topics first slider button to see all the trending topics for your seed keyword at first. And you can also use the Prioritize Topics By option to sort the results by volume, difficulty or topic efficiency.

If you find any irrelevant card which you don’t want to see in the topic results, then you can use the dismiss this card option to hide that.

Explorer View

SEMrush will break down content ideas by subtopic, Facebook Engagements, backlinks and total shares.

Facebook engagement is defined as the number of times that each page was shared on Facebook.

You can sort the topics list by trending subtopics by clicking the trending subtopics first slider at the top.

Overview

The overview type will bring the Top 10 Headlines by backlinks, 10 Interesting Questions, subtopics and related searches.

SEMrush will sort the results and show you the Top subtopics and top 10 related searches to make your topic research.

You can also sort the result by volume, difficulty and topic efficiency with easy using the tabs at the top.

Mind Map View

This is very interesting… You might already aware of this view if you ever used AnswerThePublic tool. It has the same interface as AnswerThePublic tool provide.

It is good for you if you are a visual person, you can switch to the Mind Map view to see the visual view of content ideas. The information will be the same, you’ll be seeing topics, headlines and questions about your seed keyword.

The trending topics are highlighted with the red colour.

Creating SEO Template

When you are ready with the content topic to start writing, SEMrush also provides an SEO Template that will help you in writing well-crafted SEO friendly content.

Click on the three dots of the topic you selected to write, and select Create SEO Template.

Recommendations like Semantically related words you should need to add, domains that your competitors getting backlinks from, average readability score and the text length.

SEMrush will also show you how your competitors are using keywords in their content. This will give an idea of how to put your target keywords in the content.

Finding Link Building Opportunities Using SEMrush

This is the most trending topic when you come into SEO or blogging, “link building“.

What if I say that SEMrush can make link building easy for you?

You might get SUPRISED!Right?

Yes, SEMrush has a dedicated tool for link building which helps you in finding link building opportunities around you.

SEMrush’s Link Building collects the list of link building opportunities for your domain and provides your simple interface to run an outreach campaign.

For configuring the Link Building Tool, you need to head back to the projects where you added your domain. Click on the Setup button on Link Building tool.

Add your keywords for which you want to get higher rankings.

After adding keywords, add your competitors you want to outrank. After adding the competitors, fit the Start Link Building button to find all the link building opportunity for your domain.

SEMrush will show you all the prospects, these are the backlinks opportunities. You will be seeing the backlinks opportunities that your competitors managed to get, backlinks that you have lost, mentions without any link and SEMrush will show you more ideas using the advanced search operators.

You will be seeing all those backlinks opportunities, your small effort in the right direction can lead you to earn some quality backlinks.

Go to Prospects tab to see all the backlinks prospects.

You will see all the backlinks opportunities based on the keywords and competitors you have added while performing the link building and it will also your the backlink you have lost so you can earn them again.

SEMrush also shows you the details about the domain of all the prospects, total backlinks that domains have, total no of referring domains, total no. of keywords that bringing traffic, domain relevancy, toxic rank etc.

After exploring and filtering out all the prospects, you will be able to send some to the In Progress section to start the outreach process.

Click on the Down arrow in To Progress button to see all the pre-built templates from the most common scenario.

SEMrush makes easy to do outreach to the domain for the adding link to your domain. SEMrush offers a simple to use interface do this directly from the SEMrush tool. Even SEMrush will pull the contact emails of all the link prospects so you don’t need to do it yourself.

Now go to In Progress tab… You can see that SEMrush has already pulled the contact emails of the domain you are going to reach for the backlink.

Click on the Contact button, you are free to customize the template as per to increase the chances of your success.

Once the customization has done, click on the Send and proceed to the next button. You need to follow the same process for all the domain you added in progress.

SEMrush also tracks the performance of your outreach campaigns.

Position Tracking On The Go

SEMrush also has a mobile app that will help you to do position tracking on the go.

You don’t need to visit SEMrush to check that, instead SEMrush position tracking makes it convenient to check your keyword position on the go using your mobile phone.

Ravi Dixit

Ravi Dixit is a Blogger and Affiliate Marketer, He is the founder of StayMeOnline Who Loves to help others.
Travelling and learning new things online are his first love.
"I only want a life without any boundaries- Ravi Dixit"

Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy any product using an affiliate link placed on this blog, it will not add any extra cost in the total price of the product rather I will get some commission from the company. This will show me 💖 from your side, for more details read this...